Supernatural: All in the Family

Filed under: Recaps & Reviews

To fight Amara, the Winchesters need all the help they can get. Any help. Even douche help.

After seeing Chuck again, the boys are at a loss but after a quick chat and a sudden teleport back to the bunker they start to realize who they are dealing with. Sam is pretty nervous and excited by the whole thing but Dean...not so much. Dean has seen world ending event after event and asks questions God on his reasons for doing nothing. God tells him that he needed to step away and let humanity take care of itself and that Dean shouldn't confuse him with his dad. Back at wherever they are, Amara is torturing Lucifer with the hopes that God will eventually step in and save his favourite son and decides to unleash a fog on Lewis, Oklahoma while she's at it. Everyone in the town dies except for one man, Professor Donatello Redfield, so the boys go to question him to see if he knows anything about Amara or how he managed to survive. Renfield describes the insanity that overtook Lewis but then how he was suddenly hit by some unknown force and given the knowledge that he could have never possibly had in languages he doesn't know. After a quick test, Sam confirms that Renfield is a prophet of the Lord. They take Renfield back to the bunker for a quick meet and greet with Chuck and fill him in on the rest of the story. That's when Dean gets a call from the original scribe, Metatron. After meeting up with Metatron hell tells the boys that Chuck is planning to make a deal with Amara: she gets him as long as she leaves creation alone. Dean confronts Chuck on that one as it might be selfless but Amara will never take that deal and plans to kill him and destroy creation anyways. Chuck says that even if he's gone, the chosen ones like Dean will step up. That's why he saved him all those years ago. Well, the boys have a plan but it's risky. Use Dean as bait to lure Amara away while Sam, Donatello and Metatron save Lucifer for an inevitable team up with Chuck to save the world. What could go wrong?

Following last week's Don't Call Me Shurley, All in the Family felt like an elaborate set up more than a great episode unto itself. Don't Call Me Shurley had a much slower pace and gave us the opportunity to have a lot of our questions answered about Chuck/God. All in the Family felt like a retread of that for the first fifteen minutes as Dean was asking all of the same questions that Metatron had asked last week but they were answered very quickly and in such a way to make Chuck come across as a dick rather than having real motivation for letting humanity find its own footing in creation. After that was finally out of the way, meeting another prophet was interesting but how that fits into the season with only two episodes left is kind of confusing. Can Renfield immediately come back so quickly? He may have to now that the Winchesters lost the scribe of the Lord.

Speaking of Metatron, he definitely had the most unexpected arc this season. Fans of Supernatural have grown to have a lot of disdain for this character over the years (he did kill Dean at one point) but that all changed this season. Stripped of his grace and no longer trying to become God to fill the void that his father left, Metatron became a very sympathetic character over the past few episodes and a huge part of that is due to Curtis Armstrong. Armstrong pulled off the impossible and made a former villain likeable. One that was responsible for tricking Castiel and having the angels cast out of heaven. Did he die in that moment with Amara? Possibly but I've been wrong before. It's only too bad that his potential death was utterly pointless and that God had no reaction to his scribe sacrificing himself for the others to get away.

A definite drawback of All in the Family, and really the whole season, continues to be Emily Swallow as Amara. On her own, Amara is already a paper thin character whose only motivation is destruction for the sake of it, take revenge on Chuck for locking her away for eons and absorb Dean. But we got all of that almost half way through the season and nothing else since then. At this point, she appears like a good idea for a character that has never been thought through. With so little to go on, Swallow just can't keep it interesting anymore because we have heard it all. How many times can she raise her arm and destroy someone or raise both arms to the sky and destroy something else?

All in the Family had its moments but isn't the strong episode to build momentum into the tail end of the season. As a result, it felt more like filler until next week's We Happy Few can step it up when Rowena makes her move.

Tags: Supernatural, Dean Winchester, Jared Padalecki, Metatron, Jensen Ackles, Jared Padelecki, Curtis Armstrong, Emily Swallow

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